Generally, a toy block, which includes a plurality of assembling bodies having various solid forms such as rectangular parallelepiped, cylinder and so on, builds various structures through the assembling bodies coupled to each other, thereby providing a lot of educational effects for children who perform the assembling operations and also improving the children's intelligence and creativity through the production of various models.
In this case, generally, the toy block includes cylindrical block bodies open on one side thereof and having a plurality of coupling protrusions protruding from the surface corresponding to the open surface of another block body. The block bodies have various sizes and colors, and they are freely coupled to one another so as to build desired forms. Accordingly, the toy block has been widely used as play for developing creativity of babies or children.
On the other hand, a conventional representative technology related to the toy block is disclosed in Korean patent registration No. 10-1521194 (entitled ‘assembling toy block’, which is hereinafter referred to as ‘Prior art) filed on Nov. 20, 2013 and issued on May 12, 2015 to the same applicant as the invention.
According to the Prior art, the assembling toy block, which has a shape of a polyhedron, includes a plurality of top hollow cylindrical protrusions protruding from top of the polyhedron in such a manner as to be spaced apart from each other by a given distance and a plurality of bottom hollow cylindrical protrusions protruding from one side of bottom of the polyhedron in such a manner as to be tightly coupled to the plurality of top hollow cylindrical protrusions of another polyhedron. Further, the top hollow cylindrical protrusions and the bottom hollow cylindrical protrusions include contact reinforcement concave-convex portions each having a plurality of contact protrusions protruding from the inner peripheries thereof in such a manner as to be spaced apart from each other by a given distance, and joint units are fitted to the contact reinforcement concave-convex portions in such a manner as to have contact reinforcement fixing portions adapted to allow the outer peripheries of the contact protrusions to be fixedly contacted with the inner peripheries of the hollow cylindrical protrusions.
According to the Prior art, the contact reinforcement fixing portions of the joint units are fitted to the contact reinforcement concave-convex portions formed in the grooves of the toy block, and if the joint units are coupled to the toy block, the rigidly coupled state is maintained. If it is desired that the joint units are separated from the toy block, however, a relatively strong force has to be required, which is disadvantageous to children who do not have enough force to separate them from each other.
In addition, even when the two toy blocks are assembled up and down to each other, they are coupled to each other by means of the contact reinforcement concave-convex portions and the contact reinforcement fixing portions, which also requires a relatively large force in separation of the two toy blocks coupled to each other.
According to the Prior art, moreover, a desired toy form is simply built only with the toy blocks, which is disadvantageous to producing various toy forms.